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On Wednesday, the author L.J. Davis was found dead in his Brooklyn home. He was 70. The news went by with little fanfare, especially given how great a writer Davis was. (The New York Times obituary didn't run until Saturday; by contrast, Sidney Lumet's obit was posted on the Times' website, along with a 13-minute video interview with the director, within hours of his death Saturday morning.)

Davis spent his life primarily as a journalist and novelist, but he was also an urban pioneer (or a proto-gentrifier, if you look at it from another angle). His trials, tribulations, failures, and successes in buying a brownstone in Boreum Hill, Brooklyn, and restoring it to some form of habitability during the darkest days of New York's urban decay laid the groundwork for his hilarious, poignant novel A Meaningful Life. The book was a smash with critics in 1971, but the general readership took no notice. Thirty-odd years later, though, author Jonathan Lethem wrote gushingly about it, it was republished by NYRB Classics, and a younger generation that rode into urban areas on waves of gentrification could identify with its subject matter.

A little over a year ago, I interviewed Davis for a Forbes piece I was working on about NYRB Classics. When I first contacted him over email, he responded, "My dear fellow, this will be splendid; I will have much to say." We made plans to meet at a little cafe near his apartment on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. "Why not ring my bell at six?," he wrote me the day we were to meet. "That'll give you time to hop over here. If you're early, ring the bell anyway; I'm not a great fan of punctuality, having been raised (as I was) by compulsive right-wing fanatics."

I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I started getting his emails. But when we met, our conversation was the unexpected gift of reporting the story. He was, like his writing, indelible; his manner, comportment, and attitude utterly unique. He was funny, acerbic, conspiratorial, generous, and verbose. He took the long way around when telling a story, but the view you had while taking the trip was magnificent, full of tangents and asides as interesting (if not more so) than the stories he was telling.

And, wow, the stories.

The one that's lodged in my memory forever is his recounting of how he laid out George W. Bush at a party in Washington while George H.W. Bush was Vice President. Like most of Davis' stories, it's a bit long, but the abridged version is that Bush was allegedly drunk, started hitting on Davis' friend (who was a super-intelligent, super-exotic Chinese woman), got out of hand, and then Davis decked him. Why did this come up? Something about tax troubles he was having, and how he was sure they were connected to this long-ago incident.

We talked for more than an hour, and it was a vivacious (and at times one-sided) conversation that spanned everything from writing to politics to economic issues to journalism to the publishing world. At the time, he was nursing a bum hip — "A word to the wise: breaking your hip is nature's way of telling you to go easy on the sauce," he wrote me — but otherwise he seemed strong. To hear news of his death was shocking.

The last time we communicated was when I sent him the link to the story I was working on. He responded: "Great post. Thanks, guy. LJD" It never occurred to me that he'd be gone a year later. Somewhere in the back of my mind I imagined him living for another 20 years, telling his stories, writing, and endearing himself to new generations of readers and fans.